Figure Review: Velvet by Yamato

This is my last acquisition from that Yamato sale a way back. Like Mercedes, Velvet hails from the Playstation 2 game Odin Sphere. In the game, she’s the illegitimate daughter of a king, and is now living in exile. However, her cursed blood comes back to haunt her, and she finds herself in a battle to prevent the world’s ending. I struggle to wake up in the morning for work, so she must have it pretty rough.

Yamato takes their design from a piece of official art, just like they did with Mercedes. For the most part, they got it right. The pose is spot on, as are the various details of her outfit. The face, though, looks a little off. If you match up the angle with the illustration, the mouth looks a bit too narrow, and the eyes have a slightly different shape.

Just because the face is different, doesn’t mean it’s bad. I’ll get to that in a bit, but you should just take a while to admire the rest of the figure.

You don’t need me to tell you how good the paint job is. I love the shading on the skin. I shoot with 5000K daylight bulbs, and bumped the saturation for these photos, so she looks particularly vibrant.

I think it’s safe to say Yamato did a great job with the sculpting. The folds in the cloth are amazingly realistic, and they did a fantastic job modeling her stylishly exposed torso. I have a feeling that a girl essentially squatting in some random castle in the forest would not be so voluptuous, but this is a fantasy game after all.

Now let’s look at the face. Her expression is pretty nuanced, as you can see from the sequence below.

Though I didn’t intend to take those shots for this purpose, they do a nice job of illustrating how her expression can change depending on the angle. She can look bored, confident, worried, or seductive depending on how you display the figure. I have her looking to the right, as I seem to have a shelf full of right-looking figures.

Yamato included Velvet’s psypher Graveryl, the very first psypher. In the game she can dish out some sweet combos, but nothing beats the long range spamming power of Mercedes’s bow. It’s reproduced on the figure with loving detail, and comes as an actual chain instead of a solid piece. There are a pair of transparent clips that help the chain stay on the hands, but I don’t find them to be all that useful.

The crystals on the end of the chains are shiny and translucent. My original close-up shots showed that they picked up my fingerprints, so I opted for this long-exposure shot instead. I love it when you can take an accessory from one figure and use it with others. This one would look pretty cool in the hands of one of the Black Rock Shooter girls.

Yes, she can go topless! Although this probably isn’t what you had in mind. Her uppoer torso separates so you can take off her skirt. Why do you need to do this? I don’t know. U.S. Marines go into battle with 80 lbs of gear and ceramic body armor. Velvet goes into battle with no gear and dressed like a prostitute, so clearly you need to be able to undress her even more.

Sliding the skirt over the torso takes a little effort thanks to her super-arched back. But once it’s off, the view is fully worth admiring.

At first, the face almost prevented me from buying the figure. As it turns out, Yamato’s a lot more clever than I give them credit for, and I think her expression is part of what makes this figure so cool. She doesn’t have an elaborate base or a crazy pose like something you might see from Alter, but there’s still a mystique and liveliness about her that makes the figure alluring. The fact that she’s from Odin Sphere is just icing on the cake. She has sex appeal and some genuine artistic value, and that sums up why I got into figure collecting.

2 Comments

Dion

October 16, 2012 at 11:33 pm

Excellent review, Tian! I just finally got it today in the mail and, I must say, it was worth the wait and every penny. Velvet is certainly one of the most seductive women I've ever seen in a video game, courtesy of Vanillaware's incredible artwork and gameplay. I just had to get this figure as the ultimate homage to the game, and it does her justice-and-a-half.
If Odin Sphere could get figures this amazing, imagine Dragon's Crown. O.O